The X Perspectives
Solving for what isn’t solved yet.
THE IDEA
Every company, every founder, every investor is sitting on an unknown that decides the outcome.
The X is the crossing point. It is the place where a technology, a commercial reality, and a human consequence meet, and where the value comes from holding all three at once instead of one at a time. It is also, in the most literal sense, the variable a company has not yet cracked: the untranslated technology, the deal that will not close, the path to revenue that does not yet exist.
Cross-discipline by design, because translation work is inherently cross-domain. The X is what HXV does for clients. This is also where it gets written down: notes on what is actually changing, what it does to people, and what is worth betting on.
WRITING
- AI Has No Skin in the GameFor twenty years the prediction was that ad agencies would disappear. Buyers and sellers would transact directly, the tools would keep getting better, and the middle would go away. The tools got better. The middle is still here. That fact is worth sitting with, because the industry is now running the same prediction again at a much larger scale. The new version goes like this: build an agent for every participant and every task in… Read more: AI Has No Skin in the Game
KINDRED THINKING
Roberto Pieraccini, writing from the Bell Labs tradition, argues that value dies in the gap between invention and innovation. I think that gap is the most important commercial problem of this era, and it is the one I work in. (Author’s posts here)
Clayton Christensen, the late Harvard professor who wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma, argued that the practices that make companies successful at sustaining their current business are the same practices that blind them to disruption. The blindness is built into the structure. It is the gap I keep finding inside companies, and the one I am hired to help cross. (Essential articles here)
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Notes on the unknowns we have to solve.